


Days, Weeks, Months, Decades

by thegirlwiththemouseyhair



Category: Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
Genre: Badass Grandmothers, Gen, Grandparents & Grandchildren, Misses Clause Challenge, The Blitz, World War II, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 15:31:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8629477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlwiththemouseyhair/pseuds/thegirlwiththemouseyhair
Summary: Unbeta'ed. I recognize that (if we assume the poem is “set” in the 1860’s when it was published, which we shouldn't necessarily assume) the timing is very unlikely to work out unless Lizzie and Laura are 100+ in this story, at which point I should probably be referring to their great-grandchildren rather than their grandchildren. However, I overlooked that problem because this setup seemed like a great way to have new innocent teens/children in Lizzie's and Laura's family potentially come into the path of the goblins. I hope you enjoyed this story, dear recipient - thanks so much for requesting this beautiful and ever-inspiring poem.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/gifts).



“It’ll be a tight squeeze,” Laura remarked, sitting down heavily on a kitchen chair. It would be very tight indeed: seven people in the little farmhouse she and her sister had returned to once their husbands had died and their children were ensconced in their own lives. But it would be wonderful to have most of the grandchildren with them for a time.

“I hope they’ll enjoy being together,” said Lizzie, without looking up from the bread she was setting down to cool on the counter. “Like a great big party.”

“It won’t be much of a party with the rationing going on,” Laura countered. "And with the kids worried for their parents."

Lizzie shrugged her thin shoulders.

“I know that, of course. I only meant that I like to see them all getting to know and to love each other. I almost wish Sylvia’s children were coming, too, though I know they’re safe where they are, and that we’re hardly spry enough to look after all of them at once.”

They were far more spry than they had any right to expect, Laura thought. In fact, simply being alive at their age was better than what lay in store for most people - an unexpected reward, perhaps, for what they had once suffered. She and Lizzie had speculated a great deal about the matter when they were both widowed, and after Laura’s son lost his wife. They might be wrong, though. It was hard to believe even decades on that true good could come from goblin pulp and goblin dew.

Laura's throat tightened at the memory.

“Tell me,” she said suddenly, “have you heard anything about _them_ in recent years? Since we’ll have three young girls with us…”

She watched Lizzie set her jaw in the old, brave way.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Lizzie said. “I know of no one who had such an - encounter since Emma Forrester years ago.”

Laura said nothing for a while, and relived the things that Emma Forrester’s mother had told them, and that she herself had learned decades before.

“Well, I suppose we’ll have to keep the girls away from the brook,” she said at last. “At least when there are no cars or trains going by to scare away the old, inhuman things.”

“They won’t like that,” Lizzie said. Laura could not tell whether she meant the goblins, or the girls, or the girls’ parents, who didn't approve of old superstitions anymore. All of them, perhaps.

Then they heard the muffled roar of an engine - the car their neighbour, Mr. Wilkes, had managed to keep despite the war. They looked at one another, and bustled out as quickly as they could manage.

When they reached the porch the children had already disembarked from the car. Laura and Lizzie studied them. They were familiar from visits to London or at least, in the case of the two youngest, from photographs. Jeannie, the eldest of the bunch, clutched in her hand an orange which she must have been saving all day, and smiled back at her grandmother and her great-aunt, blissfully unaware of her ill-omened name. Lizzie had appealed to her daughter not to call Jeannie that. Laura, of course, had supported her sister, confirming the story of their childhood friend who was taken too soon, but their reminiscences had counted for very little with the expecting mother. Laura watched Jeannie take her younger brother Charlie’s hand in her free one, then offer the orange to him. He crinkled his nose at it. There was something familiar about the gesture and the little boy’s reaction, as if they’d repeated the ritual many times that day. They probably had. In the letters Lizzie shared with Laura, Jeannie was always said to be something of a leader, as Lizzie herself had been, though it was some time since they’d seen her in person. Laura marveled at how tall she had grown. The prized fruit in her hand was hardly brighter than her neatly-brushed red hair.

Simon, meanwhile, was busy staring at the poplar trees behind him, and writing or sketching something with a stub of pencil on a pad of paper that looked laughably small in his large hand. Helen stood behind Jeannie on the porch, ignoring her siblings and cousins as well as Lizzie and Laura and Mr. Wilkes in his car. She was clutching an open book. The dark curls that fell over her face didn’t quite hide how quickly her eyes moved across the pages. The youngest of the girls, Catherine, was fidgeting with her yellow mittens, taking one off and then putting it on again as if she wanted someone to notice how fine it was. Laura remembered the trick well enough to recognize it in her granddaughter.

“They’re all very well,” Mr. Wilkes said to Lizzie and Laura, with a slight bow of his head. “But I’m afraid I must be off - the missus needs me.” He waved vaguely at the family through the open car window.

Lizzie thanked him for his trouble. He laughed off her thanks.

“No trouble at all,” he said. “It was my pleasure to lend a hand - for King and country, and all that.”

Jeannie sprang into action then, nodding at Mr. Wilkes, and looking pointedly at the other children.

“We owe you _our_ thanks, too,” she said, “for picking us up at the platform. Isn't that right?”

Charlie and Catherine agreed first. Simon slipped his paper and pencil into his pocket, and Helen shut the book rather guiltily before they, too, agreed, and Wilkes drove off still protesting and wreathed in smiles.

“And thank you both for letting us stay with you,” Jeannie added, with a warm look at Laura and at Lizzie. “We hope we won’t be any trouble.”

“Of course you won’t be,” Laura said. She was watching the car disappear, and wondering if the machine worked like iron did in old fairy stories, as a sort of protection. She wondered if any of her family, or any girls in the neighbourhood, would hear the fruit cry this evening, and whether their granddaughters would come to them with questions when they did, as Emma Forester’s mother had.

“Would you like to come inside?” Lizzie asked. “I’ve baked some bread, and I daresay you could use something to eat. Or should we show you around the grounds first?”  

Simon’s face brightened at the mention of a tour, although most of the children remained impassive.

“I’d be very grateful for a walk,” Simon said. “I think we all would, after the train ride.”

Jeannie knitted her brows together.

“But we don’t want to be any trouble,” she insisted, no doubt trying to hide her surprise at the thought of two old crones walking all around the farm. Perhaps she needed to hide some annoyance at her cousin, too.

“You won’t be, dear,” Laura promised. “None of you will. Let’s go for that walk, to get you acquainted with the place. You've been cooped up for hours on the train.”

Lizzie seconded Laura’s idea. It was a shame they couldn’t simply mention the dangers that waited for young maids by the brook. They could even see the place from the grounds, on a clear blue morning like this one. But children from a world of automobiles and mechanized, far away wars wouldn’t believe such things without more proof than their grandmothers’ stories. Besides, warnings had done Laura little good, in her day. ‘Thou-shalt-not’s’ were useless beforehand. What women in these parts needed were brave and devoted sisters or mothers or grandmothers to stand by them. Perhaps that was what women always needed, in every part of the world.

And Laura and Lizzie could still provide that.

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'ed. I recognize that (if we assume the poem is “set” in the 1860’s when it was published, which we shouldn't necessarily assume) the timing is very unlikely to work out unless Lizzie and Laura are 100+ in this story, at which point I should probably be referring to their great-grandchildren rather than their grandchildren. However, I overlooked that problem because this setup seemed like a great way to have new innocent teens/children in Lizzie's and Laura's family potentially come into the path of the goblins. I hope you enjoyed this story, dear recipient - thanks so much for requesting this beautiful and ever-inspiring poem.


End file.
